


Lay Your Weary Head to Rest

by grumkin_snark



Series: Comment Fics [10]
Category: Leverage
Genre: Community: leverageland, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-08
Updated: 2014-09-08
Packaged: 2018-02-16 14:45:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2273703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grumkin_snark/pseuds/grumkin_snark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eliot doesn’t like surprises.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lay Your Weary Head to Rest

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: [Surprise.](http://leverageland.livejournal.com/273859.html)

Eliot’s not a fan of surprises.  He used to be, used to love opening presents at Christmastime—however meager they were—used to love when Aimee would jump on him and pepper his face with kisses, used to love those snap thunderstorms that cracked across the sky like gunshot and drenched everything in rain before leaving just as quickly, used to love being in charge of breaking the most unpredictable of colts. ****

Not so much now, not since he was joking one minute with his platoon, the next watching as half of them exploded into red mist; and those who _weren’t_ sentenced to a closed casket funeral were writhing in varying degrees of agony and mutilation from the IED blast.  He himself earned a Purple Heart for enduring a pipe impaling his leg from whose resultant infection it took him months to recover, and a shoulder separated so badly it still clicks and pops if he moves it the wrong way.

(Not that he’d gotten to keep the award.  Turns out being in special ops means you can’t officially be accoladed with anything. A nice _fuck you, kid_ from the government to whom he’d sacrificed his life, liberty, and happiness.)

After that, surprises in his life had only gotten worse, “surprise” quickly coming to mean fists, guns, knives, or all of the above aimed straight for him.

So no, he doesn’t like surprises.

Which makes him all the more bewildered when he realizes that he actually _cares_ about this group of thieving misfits, realizes they’ve reignited the heart he was sure was dead and gone, realizes he _wants_ to be there.  It comes as an astronomical surprise, that, and he’s so used to hating anything that manages to creep up on him, yet can’t bring himself to do so with them.

And _that_ , of course, is terrifyingly reckless, considering people he cares about tend to get caught in the bloody, brutal crossfire of his wayward jobs.  He has a feeling he’ll have to remedy the situation, cut them from his life to preserve theirs, that this surprise is as bad as all the rest, and he _will_.

…eventually.


End file.
